Memory is the foundation on which our personality is built. Thanks to it, we think we know who we are. It gives us the feeling of continuity between the present, the past, and the future. We want her to be invulnerable and the slightest of her weaknesses worries us.
For a long time, memory was seen as a kind of “tape recorder” that faithfully records information and replays it intact. Today, memory specialists show that it is fragile, suggestible, malleable and reconstructable, always being written and rewritten not only by us, but also by others.
For around forty years, the controversy in psychology around recovered traumatic memories, unknown to people before they say they found them, and false memories, has always been present in clinical, scientific and legal settings. According to some clinical psychology specialists, recovered memories are true by definition and those who think otherwise are in denial. On the other hand, researchers in cognitive psychology, who favor evidence-based psychology, think that dissociative amnesia, at the origin of recovered memories, is a new name for repression, motivated by the desire to give it scientific backing.
Alternative explanations are put forward which could account for the phenomenon of recovered memories in certain cases. But due to the frequency of this phenomenon and the similarity of the scenarios in therapy, it seems that such memories very often reflect the influence of therapists and a late understanding of the traumatic nature of the facts, more than an amnesia whose etiology would be traumatic.
In this talk, research on the malleability of memory will guide the discussion about the body of evidence regarding recovered memory and false memories.
A conference given by Brigitte Axelrad, Honorary Professor of Philosophy and Psychosociology. Member of the Editorial Board of Sciences et pseudo-sciences (since 2009) and former vice-president of AFIS.
2024-02-29 19:38:28
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